‘A different person came back’

Darrell McMullin starts talking and keeps talking for 35 minutes, relating his son’s story in a steady voice. Telling it because it is what he needs to do, because it is the only thing he knows how to do.

“My wife and I decided we weren’t going to be quiet about Jamie’s death,” says the grieving father. “I spoke to three other soldiers at his memorial that had been caught in their garages with a rope up over the rafters.

“And you know, you never hear about that, and if telling Jamie’s story helps one person — if it stops one soldier from going to their basement or wherever they go — and convinces them to pick up a phone and talk to someone instead, then it is going to mean that maybe our son didn’t die in vain.”

On June 17, Corporal Jamie McMullin hanged himself in the basement of his home in Oromocto, N.B. His wife, Megan, discovered the body.

Roadside bombs and Taliban bullets did not kill Cpl. McMullin. But, says his father, the war in Afghanistan still did.

“Jamie never came home,” Mr. McMullin says. “A different person came back from Afghanistan. The best way I can put it is he tried, he tried to get back, and tried to make everybody else happy when he came home but he couldn’t make himself happy.”

The Canadian combat mission in Afghanistan might be over, but for an untold number of military personnel suffering from post traumatic stress disorder the battles will be ongoing — lonely firefights involving emotional ghosts and mental goblins that can haunt and drag a wounded mind into a desperate corner where suicide often seems the only way out.

Twelve Canadian servicemen took their own lives in 2010. The military does not keep statistics on those who may have tried and failed, or others who might have thought about it, or of the heartbroken families, like the McMullins, who have been left to try to answer an unanswerable question: Why?

Jamie McMullin was happy by nature. It was how he greeted each day, and to see him engulfed by despair, as his friends and family did upon his return from the war, was to see a person they barely recognized.

Cpl. McMullin was a hockey player, a Wayne Gretzky fanatic, the kid that every other kid wanted to hang around with. He was a magnet, a young man with a huge heart and the lasting friendships to prove it.

“Jamie was always the life of the party,” his father says. “He did not have a shy bone in his body.”

His parents always knew he would join the army. Military service was the family enterprise. Darrell did 23 years as an army mechanic and today works as a civilian fix-it man at CFB Gagetown. Brenda, his wife, did a 23-year stretch as an administrator.

“He said he wanted to go roll around in the mud and jump out of helicopters,” Mr. McMullin says.

And so that is what he did, and he was good at it. A leader in civilian clothes, he became a corporal in the Royal Canadian Regiment, one of the military’s most respected outfits.

It was a proud day when he shipped out for deployment to Afghanistan in September 2008. It was what he had trained to do. But no training can prepare a soldier for the horrors of war.

He returned home the following March, changed. He spoke to his father, told him about everything he saw and did.

“I won’t discuss any of the things that he said but I knew right then that he was going to need to get counselling,” Mr. McMullin says.

“He lost a lot of friends. He had 12 poppies tattooed on his right arm, and each one was for a friend that he had lost over there.

“That tells you what he went through, what he lost when he was there, and just the mission itself — it is awfully tough for a soldier.”

Tough is hunting for insurgents in a conflict where potential enemies are all around and the infantry are walking through the middle of it. Walking dusty, heat-blasted trails where a single wrong step could be your last and where burying your buddies and then trying to bury the demons that come with their deaths was a part of the mission nobody really talked about.

Cpl. McMullin began seeing a civilian counsellor and a psychiatrist. He also worked with a military physician.

To his father, the trauma was obvious.

“He and I would be in the same room watching a hockey game and I’d leave the room and come back in again and his head would be down,” Mr. McMullin says. “As soon as he was alone he would start thinking about Afghanistan, and he’d get depressed.

“But as soon as someone was there, he would put on a smile again, try and make them happy and make them think that everything was okay.”

Toward the end of his life, he was on six different medications. Pills for depression, anxiety and anger, pills to make him sleep, pills to suppress his dreams because he was having nightmares and pills to settle his stomach down because he was taking so many pills.

Cpl. McMullin was never a huge drinker. He started drinking after his tour. Heavily. And when he would drink, he wouldn’t take his medication and then he would get even more depressed.

The old Jamie seldom got angry. Post-Afghanistan Jamie could barely contain his rages.

“Jamie never had an anger issue before he went over and he never drank like he did before he went over,” his father says. “The drinking and the anger were all a result of post-traumatic stress.”

Cpl. McMullin kept his military kit in his basement. He was organizing it the day he took his own life. His wife, Megan, had checked on him, twice, before falling asleep on the upstairs couch with the couple’s infant son, Jake.

“We can’t even imagine how much pain he must have been in, in his mind, to leave the boys and Megan behind,” his father says. “They were his whole world.”

Hunter, his 3½-year-old, has been asking: “Where is Daddy?”

Mr. McMullin plans on telling the boy his father’s story when he is old enough. Not just the ending, but the entire arc of it, with all the joys and goodness and richness.

Until then he will be busy writing, putting every memory down on paper and soliciting Jamie’s friends to do the same. He and Brenda have already collected almost 400 photographs.

“I am going to write Jamie’s life story,” Mr. McMullin says, his strong, Cape Breton accent cracking with emotion for the first time in our lengthy conversation. “I am going to write down everything I can remember about him. I want his boys to know that that last moment in his life doesn’t define Jamie.

“That one moment does not define who our son was.”

Cpl. Jamie McMullin was a magnet, a light that drew people in.

He was a soldier that went away and never came home.
PHOTO: Provided by family